The goal of this benchmark is to compare several web server or caching server regarding their respective ability and performance to server small static files. The servers are optimized, contrary to my previous benchmark, where each server was tested using its default settings. I consider in this benchmark only the most performant open source servers, namely Varnish Cache, Nginx, Lighttpd, Apache Traffic Server as well as G-WAN (free, but not open source), as it was the clear winner of the previous test.

Introduction

Apache is the de facto web server on Unix system. Nginx is nowadays a popular and performant web server for serving static files (i.e. static html pages, CSS files, Javascript files, pictures, …). On the other hand, Varnish Cache is increasingly used to make websites “fly” by caching static content in memory. Recently, I came across a new application server called G-WAN. I’m only interested here in serving static content, even if G-WAN is also able to serve dynamic content, using ANSI C scripting. Finally, I also included Cherokee in the benchmark.

Zoie is a mature open source project and has been deployed in a real-time large-scale consumer website: LinkedIn.com handling millions of searches as well as hundreds of thousands of updates daily.

All Zoie releases have gone through extensive functional and performance testing by LinkedIn before made public. All major versions are released after a trial period on the production environment.

In a real-time search/indexing system, a document is made available as soon as it is added to the index. This functionality is especially important to time-sensitive information such as news, job openings, tweets etc.